Erin Pizzey | |
|---|---|
 Pizzey interviewed in 2016 | |
| Born | Erin Patria Margaret Carney (1939-02-19)19 February 1939 (age 86) |
| Alma mater | Cheikh Anta Diop University |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Years active | 1971–present |
| Organisation | Chiswick Women's Aid |
| Known for | Establishing the world's firstdomestic violence shelters, founding the charityRefuge[1] |
| Notable work | Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, Prone to Violence |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2, includingAmos Pizzey |
Erin Patria Margaret PizzeyCBE (/ˈpɪtsi/;[2] born 19 February 1939) is a British men's rights activist andnovelist[3][4][5][6][7] known for her advocacy on behalf of both men's and women's rights and for her work against domestic violence. She is recognized for founding the world's first and largestdomestic violence shelter in the world,Refuge, then known asChiswick Women's Aid, in 1971.[8][1][9][10]
Pizzey says that she has been the subject of death threats andboycotts because her experience and research into the issue led her to conclude that mostdomestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are as capable of violence as men. These threats eventually led to herexile from the UK.[11][12] Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists.[13][14][15] She has also stated that she is banned from the refuge she started.[16][17]
She was born Erin Carney inQingdao,[18]China, in 1939, along with hertwin sister Rosaleen. Her father was a Britishdiplomat and one of 17 children from a poorIrish family.[14][19] In 1942, the family moved toShanghai; shortly thereafter, they were captured by the invadingJapanese Army and exchanged for Japaneseprisoners of war.[20] She is the sister of writerDaniel Carney, who settled in Rhodesia and is known for his 1978 novelThe Wild Geese.[21]
Pizzey moved with her family toKokstad inSouth Africa, then at the age of five, toBeirut. At the end ofWorld War 2 the family went toToronto, Canada. They moved toTehran, Iran, and finally settled in England in 1948. Pizzey attended St Antony's junior school and thenLeweston School at the age of 11, gaining fourO-levels. Her parents were posted to Africa, where she attendedDakar University, Senegal, studyingFrench andEnglish.[22]
In 1959, Pizzey attended her first meeting at the UK'sLiberation Movement (WLM) at theChiswick house of a local organiser, Artemis[who?][23]: 22 At Artemis' urging, Pizzey agreed to convene a "consciousness-raising group" at her home inGoldhawk Road.[23]: 23 Thiscollective became the Goldhawk Road Group.[23]: 24
The head office of the Women's Liberation Workshop (a women'sworkshop within the WLM) was in Little Newport Street,[23]: 24 inChinatown,Covent Garden, straddling theCity of Westminster and theBorough of Camden. Along with her friend, Alison, and other members of the Goldhawk Road Group, Pizzey found herself at odds with Artemis and Gladiator[who?], who led a clique of younger women within the WLM Workshop head office.[23]: 27 Pizzey distanced herself from this clique when she witnessed what she described as "irregular and disrespectful behaviour" towards the money donated by desperate women across the UK.[23]: 39 She confronted them over this behaviour,[23]: 45 which, according to her, included claiming that telephones were tapped, and labelling of people they did not like asMI5, police andCIA informers or agents.[23]: 39 She also was concerned about overhearing discussion of plans to bomb the London storeBiba; she reported on this to the police after warning the people involved. Subsequently, Pizzey became aware that the police had the group and offices under surveillance.[23]: 43 Pizzey saidthat she and her fellow members of the Goldhawk Road group were seen as troublesome, because they did not accept others' behaviors and views.[23]: 34
Pizzey set up a women's refuge in Belmont Terrace,Chiswick, London, in 1971. She later opened a number of additional shelters, despite hostility from the authorities. She gained notoriety and publicity for setting up refuges bysquatting, most notably in 1975 at the Palm Court Hotel inRichmond.[24][25][26] Pizzey's work was widely praised at the time. In 1975, MPJack Ashley stated in theHouse of Commons that "The work of Mrs. Pizzey was pioneering work of the first order. It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical by establishing the Chiswick aid centre. As a result of that magnificent pioneering work, the whole nation has now come to appreciate the significance of the problem".[27] While being prosecuted by local authorities[28] and appealing matters to theHouse of Lords, she was recognised for her work.[28]
After Pizzey left Chiswick Women's Aid (renamed Chiswick Family Rescue on 31 March 1979), the organisation she had founded and moved abroad, it was rebranded as the charityRefuge on 5 March 1993.[29] Although Refuge traces its existence back to Chiswick Women's Aid, Pizzey's name could not be found anywhere on the Refuge website for many decades.[3] It was not until 2 November 2020 that Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge since 1983, mentioned Pizzey's name for the first time again on the Refuge website in a press release upon her retirement.[30]
Soon after establishing her first refuge, Pizzey asserted that much of the domestic violence was reciprocal.[23]: 82 She reached this conclusion when she asked the women in her refuge about their violence, only to discover most of them were equally violent or more violent than their husbands. In her studyComparative Study of Battered Women And Violence-Prone Women,[31] (co-researched with John Gayford of Warlingham Hospital), Pizzey distinguished between "genuine battered women"[31] and "violence-prone women";[31] the former defined as "the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner's violence"[31] and the latter defined as "the unwilling victim of his or her own violence".[31] This study reported that 62% of the sample population were more accurately described as "violence prone". Similar findings regarding the mutuality of domestic violence have been confirmed in subsequent studies.[32][33]
In her bookProne to Violence, Pizzey expressed concern that so little attention was paid to the causes of interpersonal and family violence, stating, "to my amazement, nobody seemed to genuinely want to find out why violent people treat each other the way they do".[34] She also expressed concern for the view expressed by government officials that solutions to the issue of domestic abuse and violence could be found insocialist orcommunist countries. Pizzey pointed out that marital violence was a great problem inRussia, andChina addressed the issue by proclaiming wife-beating a crime punishable bydeath sentence.[34] The book looks at what appeared to be learned behaviour, often starting in childhood, linked to hormonal responses. Pizzey described such behaviour as akin toaddiction.
She speculated that high levels ofhormones andneurochemicals associated with pervasive childhood trauma led to adults who repeatedly engage in violent altercations with intimate partners despite the physical, emotional, legal and financial costs, in unwitting attempts to simulate the emotional impact of traumatic childhood experiences and manifest the learnedbiochemical state linked to pleasure. The book contains numerous stories of disturbed families, alongside a discussion of the reasons why the modern state care-taking agencies are largely ineffective. Promotional events for the book were met with protest,[35] and Pizzey reported that she herself and co-author Jeff Shapiro needed police protection during the promotional events for the book.[13][14]
In 1981, Pizzey moved toSanta Fe, New Mexico, while targeted by harassment, death threats, bomb threats[36] and defamation campaigns,[15] and dealing with overwork, near collapse, cardiac disease and mental strain.[23]: 275 In particular, according to Pizzey, the charityScottish Women's Aid "made it their business to hand out leaflets claiming that [she] believed that women 'invited violence' and 'provoked male violence'".[15] She stated that the turning point was the intervention of thebomb squad, who required all of her mail to be processed by them before she could receive it, as a "controversial public figure".[23]: 282 [37]
Having moved to Santa Fe to write, Pizzey promptly became involved in running a refuge inNew Mexico, as well as dealing with sexual abusers andpaedophiles.[15] Pizzey said of this work, "I discovered that there were just as many women paedophiles as there were men. Women go undetected, as usual. Working against paedophiles is a very dangerous business."[38] While she was living in Santa Fe, one of her dogs was shot and two others were stolen, which she claimed was a result ofracist neighbours.[36] Her family suffered new harassment following the publication of her 1982 bookProne to Violence. Pizzey linked much of the harassment to militant feminists and their objections to her research, findings and work.[15][36][39] Describing the harassment, Deborah Ross ofThe Independent wrote that "the feminist sisterhood went bonkers".[14]
Following the abuse and threats in Santa Fe, Pizzey moved toCayman Brac, Cayman Islands,[40] where she wrote with her second husband, Jeff Shapiro. Subsequently, she moved toSiena, Italy, where her writing and advocacy work continued. She returned to London in the spring of 1997, homeless due to debt and in increasingly poor health.[14]
Pizzey remained active in helping victims of domestic violence. She is a patron of the charityManKind Initiative from 2004, when she received a Roger Witcomb Award.[41] In March 2007, as a guest, she attended the ceremony of opening the first Arab refuge for victims of domestic violence inBahrain.[42]
In 2013, Pizzey joined the editorial and advisory board of themen's rights organisationA Voice for Men, serving as an Editor and DV Policy Advisor and from January to August wrote thirteen articles for the group's web site.[3] Her two April 2013 articles pertained to two interviews she gave on theReddit community "IAmA", in which she promoted her Facebook page, and the "AVFM Online Radio" podcast onBlogTalkRadio.[43] She announced her first interview a week prior on /r/MensRights.[44]
In November 2014, Pizzey became owner/manager of the AVFM WhiteRibbon.org website (since renamed Honest-Ribbon.org), which has been criticised by the originalWhite Ribbon Campaign as "a copycat campaign articulating ... archaic views and denials about the realities of gender-based violence".[45][46][47]
Pizzey was interviewed for and appeared in the 2016 documentary filmThe Red Pill byCassie Jaye about themen's rights movement.[17] Pizzey is a patron of registered charity Compassion In Care which works to "break the chain of elderly abuse" and she wrote an introduction for the bookBeyond The Facade by founderEileen Chubb.[48][49] In 2022, Pizzey was listed as Honorary Lifetime President Emeritus to CPU: Children Parents United Charity founded byGreg Ellis.[50] The charity appears to be shut down as of April 2023.[citation needed] Pizzey has also been a patron of the shared parenting charityBoth Parents Matter in the last few years.
In 2009, Pizzey was successful in a libel case againstMacmillan Publishers over content in theAndrew Marr bookA History of Modern Britain. The publication had falsely claimed she had once been part of a militant group,The Angry Brigade, that staged bomb attacks in the 1970s.[51] The publisher also recalled and destroyed the offending version of the book and republished it with the error removed.[52] The link to the Angry Brigade was made in 2001, in an interview withThe Guardian, in which the article states that she was "thrown out" of the feminist movement after threatening to inform police about a planned bombing by the Angry Brigade of the clothes shopBiba. "I said that if you go on with this – they were discussing bombing Biba [the legendary department store inKensington – I'm going to call the police in, because I really don't believe in this".[53]
Pizzey marriedJack Pizzey in 1959. Jack Pizzey was a naval lieutenant whom she first met inHong Kong. They had two children, a girl, Cleo, and a boy,Amos.[14] Shedivorced him in 1976, and divorced her second husband, Jeff Scott Shapiro, in 1994.[19] Pizzey lives inTwickenham, South West London.[54] She was diagnosed withcancer in 2000.[53]
In 2000, Pizzey's grandson Keita Craig, who hadschizophrenia, hanged himself in a prison cell. Pizzey and her family campaigned against the coroner's verdict ofdeath by hanging and in 2001 a jury at a second inquestunanimously found that Keita's death was contributed to by the neglect of prison staff. The case was the first to reach a verdict of neglect in asuicide case.[53][55]
Pizzey was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the2024 New Year Honours for services to the victims of domestic abuse.[56][57]
In 1972 the center was visited by U.S. feminists, who set up similar ventures in the United States ...
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)In honor of International Women's Day on March 8, Stop Abuse for Everyone (SAFE) has designed its "Woman of the Year" award to celebrate women who recognize underserved victims of both domestic violence and abuse, as well as those whose long-term devotion focuses on helping victims despite their gender, age, race, or sexual identity.
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